Here is the book

Forty pages

Here is the book. It is a place of forty pages. But look, there are pages within the pages, and there are pages within those pages, and soon there will be a flower growing from within the center of all the pages, and from the outer pages springs of green grass shall sprout, while from between the petals of the flower a variety of birds emerge, sparrows, flycatchers, cardinals, phainopepla, and above the sun emerges from a full cloud to brighten and warm the day, and we read the book in which is written our life story, but how, we ask ourselves, for there are two of us here, no, wait, two and four and 19 groups of two, all asking, how can our life story be written for we have lived no life and know no language, and the peal of the bell, many bells along with stringed instruments calls our attention away from our questioning and brings us back to a single sheet of paper, folded so that we might hold it in our hands while behind us a wave very gradually and without shouting comes onto the shore and a gull comes on the second wave and a boat comes on the third wave and people with brown and white and yellow skin emerge from the boat and ask us what light we walk under, what rain covers us and makes the flowers grow and what a page contains but we can not answer for we only know that the next step we take will cause the ringing of another bell the plucking of another string the gradual quickening of the pace of the rhythm tapped upon the smooth wood of our wandering. And now that a stop has been placed in the river we must stop gazing to the west where the light has again gone behind the cloud and the birds have quieted and the flower has retreated into the pages of a book and the forty pages have closed so that just a face full cheeked and sleepy eyed and with a querulous look is facing us as we close our eyes.

Notes on Poetry & Books & . . . from Tucson, Arizona, will be the focus for a wing & a word, and while the majority of the posts will address both ideas and practices concerned with book thinking and book making, there will also be forays into other aspects of poetics, commentary on visual art and visual thinking, and much that will surprise even the author. Stay tuned.

Charles Alexander is the founder/director of Chax Press, author of five books of poetry, most recently Pushing Water, from Cuneiform Press in 2011; and 9 chapbooks. He is the editor of Talking the Boundless Book (Minnesota Center for Book Arts), and former director of Minnesota Center for Book Arts. Alexander also is Senior Lecturer at University of Arizona South (where he co-directs the program for English majors), and he teaches at the Naropa University Summer Writing Program. In Tucson, he is a co-founder and one of the several directors of the organization POG, which has presented poetry and prose readings, visual art presentations and lectures, musical performances, and more. He is married to the visual artist Cynthia Miller, and has two daughters, Kate & Nora.

Alexander shares a studio, rented from the organic bakery behind the wall, with Cynthia Miller. Her painting web site appears in the list of web sites here so that you have an idea of what sorts of things he looks at every day. If he could include the smells from the bakery, he would do so.

The title a wing & a word hails from Alexander's long poem "Suspend" (included in the book Certain Slants), which is inspired by the choreography of Hawaii/Arizona dancer and choreographer Anne Bunker, with whom Miller and Alexander concocted many collaborations in the 1980s through 2005, before OTO Dance (the company of Bunker and her composer/husband Chuck Koester) moved to Hawaii as their main base. Alexander has described a Minnesota park of inscriptions on stones as the book writ large on open ground. Perhaps Bunker's choreography is a book of movement on stage and through the air.

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Jacket2Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Commentaries Editor Jessica Lowenthal or contact us at this page.